Are coupled file changes suggestions useful?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Data Science, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Coupled file changes, Data Mining, Software Repositories
- Copyright
- © 2016 Ramadani et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Are coupled file changes suggestions useful? PeerJ Preprints 4:e2492v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2492v1
Abstract
Background. Software maintenance is an important activity in the process of software engineering where over time maintenance team members leave and new members join. The identification of files being changes together frequently has been proposed several times. Yet, existing studies about these file changes ignore the feedback from developers as well as the impact on the performance of maintenance and rely on the analysis findings and expert evaluation.
Methods. We conducted an experiment with the goal to investigate the usefulness of coupled file changes during maintenance tasks when developers are inexperienced in programming or when they are new on the project. Using data mining on software repositories we can identify files that changed most frequently together in the past. We extract coupled file changes from the Git repository of a Java software system and join them with corresponding attributes from the versioning and issue tracking system and the project documentation. We present a controlled experiment involving 36 student participants where we investigate if coupled file change suggestions influence the correctness of the task solutions and the time to complete them.
Results. The results show that coupled file change suggestions significantly increase the correctness of the solutions. However, there is only a small effect on the time to complete the tasks. We also derived a set of the most useful attributes based on the developers feedback.
Discussion. Coupled file changes and a limited number of the proposed attributes are useful for inexperienced developers working on maintenance tasks whereby although the developers using these suggestions solved more tasks, they still need time to organize and understand and implement this information.
Author Comment
Experiment on usefulness of couple file change suggestions during maintenance tasks. This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.